Lady of Darkness
by cagd
Summary: Everyone has embarassing relatives even Cordelia Chase.


Simply put, Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x (the "x" being silent) was Ubergoth.

Her hair, which had exactly the right degree of bedraggled elegance, was done up with easily five pounds per side's worth of custom falls in twin ponytails, the part in between an inch wide (Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x 'd had it permanently lasered clean along with her eyebrows before having an H.R. Geiger inspired albino black mamba tattooed in the resulting void, which wrapped its tail about her throat before slithering up over the partially naked dome of her skull, the head staring out at the cruel world from between her eyes).

As to the hair the Goddess had gifted Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x with at birth, what was left of it to mingle with her dreads was now various shades of black, purple and carmine, depending on which Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x felt like, as dictated by the phases of her sister the Moon and sprinkled with tiny artfully tarnished silver skull beads.

Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x leather gartered stockings were always torn in the right places, be they fishnet or stripes of red, black, or purple. Her shoes were always right, which meant that they were nearly impossible to walk in, likewise her corsets, arm warmers, and what-have-you's – they were worn in the right places, torn in the right places, and cinched in, well, all the _right_ places – deliberately slashed to display her ever expanding collection of spider, skull, and bat body jewelry: a dozen artfully tarnished silver rings enhanced her left eyebrow and two artfully tarnished silver skulls with garnet eyes adorned her right. A tiny artfully tarnished silver dagger pierced the septum of her nose while three more pierced the space between her eyes. Her ears were barely visible for all the artfully tarnished silver weighing them down – you could have passed a tennis ball through her stretched lobes had you cared to.

There were nipple rings, naval rings, sternum piercings, tongue piercings, clitoral piercings, a lip plate, artfully tarnished silver rings tastefully studding the undersides of her arms, and a chain which went from her left nostril (the nose being a gift from her parents for her sixteenth birthday, back in the bad old days when Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x was known as Susan Chase...) to her left ear, her right nipple, her navel, and then further down into enemy territory... her permanent vampire fang caps were the best money could buy, likewise the teflon devil horn implants on each temple - she was no brainless sheeple like her moronic cousin Cordelia in all her totally mundane Dolce & Gabbana glory!

Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x's complexion was flawlessly pale and resided in an alabaster canopic jar from an Egyptian tomb that she got off ebay on her dressing table, a mahogany Victorian piece from London her parents had given her for her fifth birthday - Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x'd had it and all her other furniture customized at great expense for her twenty first birthday, a process which obviously involved a can of blood red Krylon, a hammer, electrical tape, and a blowtorch.

Flair for interior design or not, Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x was never seen without her complexion, accompanied by black lipstick and enough black liquid eyeliner to drown a small, fluffy dog in – of which her mother had many.

Her nails were long, black (or red or purple or white or artfully tarnished silver, etc...) and pointedly razor sharp. They lurked within a Chinese puzzle box adorned with skulls beside the canopic jar, ready for any occasion.

As hinted at earlier, Lady Maniacl Compulsion Nyhtshade'x was no stranger to ink banging– Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x had a full-sized set of biomechanical raven's wings (H.R. Geiger, again) permanently spilling down her shoulders, across her buttocks, and all the way down to her ankles, but these were the lesser ones. Snatches of dark poetry entwined her arms and legs in between the artfully tarnished silver rings. And were you really, truly intimate with Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x, you'd see poetry she'd written herself, a sight only the privileged could claim the pleasure of having read – generally for the price of a joint, or a tab of something really awesome washed down with beer, Budweiser in a pinch, and nobody had seen her actual irises (a washed-out pale blue) in years – serpent's slits and eight balls, too sat sterilizing next to the canopic jar which sat beside her nails for all occasions in her bedroom in Sunnydale's most exclusive neighborhood, ready for any and all of Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x's dramatic exits to her father's now nightly tune of "Hey PRINCESS, seeing as you're _32_ with a PhD in Latin with an emphasis in Vampire Literature, Women's Studies and Comparative Celtic Mythology– ever think about getting up off your tattooed ASS and getting a JOB???"

I digress.

Body art and PhD aside, what was Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x in all her dark magnificence doing out on such a night where lightning flashed blue overhead and the hot manzanilla winds of the desert stirred the trees?

Simple: Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x was holding court to the wild, indifferent elements among the tombstones and crypts of Sunnydale Cemetery, reciting the words inked between her leather-strapped thighs and artfully tarnished silver-pierced arms with their swathes of artfully tarnished silver chains into the fangs of the approaching storm, which stirred her custom silk batwings and black lace trimmed velvet cloak, causing her to stagger as she stood upon the uneven mound of a fresh grave in her 50 buckle platform ballerina boots with their welded steel chain soles, sending a zig-zagging erotic tombstone thrill through her linked hardware all down her body where it showed between the deliberate rips in her heavily spiked corset with matching spiked g-string:

_"I cannot escape this hurt and anger  
confused  
splitting  
i await my lover's bloody kisses  
the beginning of the end  
tears of blood stream from my wrist..."_

Tears of dark ecstasy and eyeliner dripping like candle wax down her pale cheeks with their black widow beauty mark tattoos and realistic maggots, Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x didn't notice the growing sizzle in the air _"...though i breathe i am not truly alive the blood..."_

Thunder rumbled, she raised her arms in a flourish of black snakeskin and artfully tarnished silver studded gloves and pendant chains from the rings imbedded in her skin...

"..._that i have bled for thee gushing_

_i am fallen and_

_will never rise _

_life is my blood_

_endless tears..."_

Blue fire now faintly outlining her jewelry, Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x paused for dramatic effect before shrieking into the rising wind, twin crowning glories of graveside hair rising into the crackling air Medusa-style, along with her pubes, shaved into a Black Widow spider...

_"...i await my lover's bloody kisses_

_the beginning of the end..."_

A few large drops of rain fell, Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x clawed at the starless sky, clenching her spiderweb chain and ankh pendant-draped fists at an indifferent Heaven, shrieking,_"...__i wish i could dance forever in the night utterly unloved my only companion is the darkness The fallen the outcast the dark ange__ls..."_

Ka-POW!!!

(Plus a blinding blue-white flash and a whiff of ozone.)

...which abruptly brought to an end, _"The fallen the outcast"._

...leaving any _"...dark angels..." _in the immediate vicinity to fly away like so many greasy starlings fleeing a McDonald's parking lot...

...ditto any _"endless tears" - _leaving bits of flaming, silk, fused polyester, 110 pounds of charred, inedible ham, a dark rainbow of shriveled, stinking hair extensions complete with artfully tarnished silver skull beads, and large amounts of occult jewelry and stainless steel tackle, all somewhat melted, to land heavily face down upon the now smoking uneven turf of a new grave...

...

...

Spike casually sauntered out of the doorway of his lair where he'd been taking in Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x's poetry slam with folded arms, cocked head and sucked-in cheeks, took out the unlit fag he'd stashed behind his left ear and lit it from the still glowing remains of one of Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x's heavily adorned 50-buckle platform ballerina boots with their slowly cooling welded chain soles, before swaggering off towards the bright lights of downtown to find someone to terrorize into giving him more fag money, muttering, "Bloody Hell, no sense of meter whatsoever!"

The storm, despite its initial promise, broke up and drifted away into the attic of the night.

That same evening, a soccer mom mentioned in passing to her best friend Mitzi over margaritas and guacamole on the patio, as having seen a pack of coyotes dragging something long and black into a nearby culvert in the brief flash of her high beams when she passed the cemetery on the way home from Chuck E. Cheese.

Which was about the time the Slayer, while out on patrol, tripped over a "butt-ugly boot" among the dark aisles of Sunnydale Cemetery, causing her to say something rude about people who don't pick up after themselves.

After a week of her not coming home, Lady Maniycal Compulshone Nyhtshade'x's parents had the canopic jar where her complexion resided and a large amount of poetry, fake fingernails and artfully tarnished silver jewelry boxed up and placed in storage, figuring that sooner or later, she'd come home and claim it, even as her mother brought in an exclusive interior decorator from L.A. to redo her daughter's now empty room.


End file.
